Cylinder walls and hot surfaces of the head for an internal combustion engine have been lined with ceramic based materials to improve the insulating quality of the engine housing. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,341,826, the art teaches the manufacture of engine parts formed from silicon carbide fiber-reinforced ceramic or glass mixtures. Essentially, the ceramic is used as a liner for the cylinder walls as well as for the hot surface of the head, and may even be used for the top surface of the piston; these surfaces represent the critically heated surfaces of a combustion chamber for a typical internal combustion engine. As another example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,245,611, aluminum pistons have been coated with ceramic to improve the insulating quality of the hot top surface of the piston.
The above prior art approaches have not been extirely successful because (a) metallic sealing rings, carried by the piston, are unable to properly seal against ceramic when used as a liner for the cylinder walls, and (b) the hot surfaces of an aluminum piston are insufficiently insulated when ceramic is coated onto the piston, unless such coating is extremely thick, which fact contributes to cracking and differential thermal expansion problems associated with the supporting aluminum piston.
What is needed is a method by which existing or conventional internal combustion engine housings can be modified to accept ceramic insulating members, whereby the sealing rings of the piston continue to bear against metallic cylinder walls and the insulating quality of ceramic is not damaged by use on the piston.